Millay cont.

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Millay is now in her late 20s and famous, courted by Edmund Wilson (though it's hard to tell if they, you know). SHe has already fulfilled her declaration to Floyd Dell about "many lovers". She and her mother and sisters take a cottage in Truro on Cape Cod for a summer. Her sister remembered that the little cottage was swarming with bees -- I bet they were yellow jackets actually. They knew a Swedish writer among the Provincetown/Truro artists who had bees in his house too. He'd been in the bath, he told them, when a bee landed on the tip of his penis "He remained, shall we say, perfectly still. And quick as a wink Vincent said, 'Where the bee sucks, there suck I.' .. She could say such things, and did say them, immediately, without a moment's thought."

Norma, who died at 93, is Milford's great informant, bearer of the family secrets, but more than that a wonderful character in her own right. She brings down for Milford three dolls that the girls' mother made, porcelain-faced but with real hair -- the girls' own. (Their mother made hair pieces and wove hair for wigs.) The Vincent doll with fiery red hair. When Milford confesses to finding them "macabre" Norma admits their clothing needs washing.

"I must wash their clothes, and then you won't be afraid to touch them."
"I'm not afraid."
"Yes, you are."
"What am I afraid of?"
"I don't know. Oh, maybe I have a little hunch."


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